I learned that adults were not soaring gods, but rather back-yard birds with broken wingtips.When you are thirteen, about to free-fall into the real world, discovering the broken wingtips is terrifying.

In the old days, when travelers would get lost, they would follow the stars and I love that idea. I wish that I could rely on something as simple and magnificent as a star for all of my aching questions.

Don’t worry if people think you’re crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they’re destined to be.

There is a secret layer of humanity that lies just beneath the surface of man, a secret layer where our fears and insecurities hide, that when touched in this secret place men and woman are somehow liberated.

I know that your soul is on life support and that you feel lost and like you’re completely spinning out of control, but you’re finding yourself — here, tonight… even in this darkness.

I ruin everything. I think that a bullet must have passed through my heart when I was very young, causing me to bleed out slowly, over things and people and every white surface that I’d ever come across.

My parents won’t let me have a motorcycle, but they give me all the guns I want. I asked them for a motorcycle last Christmas and they told me I’d only kill myself. They got me this twelve-gauge instead.

But sometimes you have to make a decision with your heart instead of your head, and that’s what I did. I know I’ve made the right decision even if it takes my brain a little while to catch up to my heart.

Not long after my mom died, my dad pretty much kicked me out of the house. He never said, “Get out of my house,” but instead, I came home one night to find all my clothes scattered all over our front lawn.

I’ve always seen this in you, ever since you were a little girl — this hunger to love other people into their highest selves and it’s what has made me irreversibly and just so forever in love with you.

This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)

Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made sense forever…

Living with myself wasn’t all that easy. I was not the young girl I once was. Once upon a time when I looked in the mirror, I saw this happy glow. Now nothing glowed except the leftover face cream from the night before.

I really believe that there is an invisible red thread tied between him and me, and that it has stretched and tangled for years — across oceans and lifetimes. I know that it won’t break because our souls are tied.

I want to understand the strings that are tied between me and certain other people and if they really can stretch through infinite time and space without ever breaking. Are soul mates real, and is my life ever going to make sense?